'Cherry Orchard' neither sweet nor sour

For the past five years, the tiny Classic Stage Company has become the unexpected home of indie-Chekhov -- most memorably with Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard in Austin Pendleton's intimate, conversational stagings of "Uncle Vanya" and "Three Sisters."

Now Dianne Wiest -- miscast in a twitchy, misguided production of "The Seagull" by a visiting Russian director in 2008 -- has returned to be better treated in "The Cherry Orchard," the fourth and final installment of the four-part series of Chekhov's masterworks.

Compared with that tricked-up "Seagull," director Andrei Belgrader's staging of Chekhov's last great play, also starring John Turturro, is a model of restraint and interesting ideas. But the accomplished Romanian director -- who has staged fascinating Beckett with Turturro at this theater and at BAM -- never finds a shape or consistent voice to make the grand sprawling tragicomedy connect and cohere.

This is more like a splatter painting, a canvas dotted with compelling splotches, with a cast that should be able to pull the colors together but does not. Taking Chekhov at his word that he had written a comedy, Belgrader -- using a blunt new translation by John Christopher Jones -- chooses foolishness at the expense of what the Russian master also called "the subtle, elusive beauty of human grief."

Wiest, with her deliciously hard-to-read face, moves convincingly through the haze that Ranevskaya, the vain and self-deluding landowner, uses to help herself get through the inevitable destruction of the family's estate. But at times, she teeters on an almost unseemly girlish ditziness.

Turturro plays the vulgar new-monied Lopakhin with straightforward exasperation at the obliviousness of the doomed landed gentry to the inevitable march of the middle-class. Josh Hamilton has endearing self-interest as the perpetual student, Juliet Rylance has a haunting lack of hope as the long-suffering adopted daughter while Katherine Waterston has a fine budding awareness of womanly powers as the younger daughter. Roberta Maxwell, as the old governess, floats around as if she is in a Fellini film -- jarring but not dull.

Finally, the one character who makes us feel the impact of seismic social change is the old servant Fiers, played with exquisite matter-of-fact befuddlement by the amazing Alvin Epstein. What a treasure he is.

WHAT "The Cherry Orchard"

WHERE Classic Stage Company, 136 E. 13th St.

INFO $70-$75; 212-352-3101; classicstage.org

BOTTOM LINE Splatter-shot Chekhov